Monday, January 25, 2016

I was just talking to the students in my Bilingual first-year writing class about Sabado Gigante, and there was a mix of those who knew what it was and those who didn't. In this mini-doc, we find that there was some pushback against the objectification of women, the changing dynamics of advertising and how Sabado Gigante was the first place on TV for 'Hispanics' (their use not mine), although not exactly poch@ pop because it was primarily in Spanish (although the doc is in English).

Sunday, January 24, 2016

The project began as a featured panel with Octavio Pimentel, and Natasha Jones at the Conference for College Composition and Communication in Indianapolis, Indiana (2104), and it has successfully made it through the proposal stage to the press. With feedback, chapters from contributors have been collected, circulated for review, and a great web designer who has experience with the press has been hired to mediate the chapters into HTML for the e-book platform. Would love to have more to note at this time, but we have submitted the e-manuscript to the press for review, so please keep los dedos cruzado in the meantime.

Monday, January 18, 2016

Reflections Review Raises Important Issues about Decolonialism
In the current issue of Reflections: A Journal of Public Rhetorics, Civic Writing and Service Learning, Victor Del Hierro raises interesting questions about decolonialism, geo-politics, strategic essentialism and examining literacies beyond what is written. These questions remind me of the current issue of College English on translingualism in which Ellen Cushman emphasizes the decolonial potential of de-valuing English as the center of college writing while Suresh Canagarajah outlines a course for preparing graduate students to teach translingual students, and Keith Gilyard offers warnings about the potential for flattening linguistic difference, especially stripping the discrimination away from populations speaking particularly de-valued varieties of English. Because language is one of the main characteristics of what constructs the poch@ identity, I'm similarly interested in seeing how much the performance of linguistic difference will become a strategy employed by poch@s.

Del Hierro concludes his review:

The emphasis on Poch@ Pop artists’ abilities to operate
within pop culture makes them important rhetoricians and communicators for
Mexican Americans. Because of the myriad of experiences and political leanings
within the community, the role of the Poch@ becomes vital towards creating a
familiar ground for inter-generational belonging within and for Mexicans within
the United States. (107)